The Legend of Witchcraft and the Origin of Wicca

"The fact is that the instincts of ignorant people invariably find
expression in some form of witchcraft. It matters little what the
metaphysician or the moralist may inculcate; the animal sticks to his
subconscious ideas ..."
— Aleister Crowley, The Confessions

"Gather together in the covens as of old, whose number is eleven,
that is also my number. Gather together in public, in song and dance
and festival. Gather together in secret, be naked and shameless and
rejoice in my name."
— Liber 49, The Book of Babalon, Jack Parsons, 1946

"If you are on the Path, and see the Buddha walking towards
you, kill him."
— Zen saying, paraphrased slightly

"Previously I never thought of doubting that there were many
witches in the world; now, however, when I examine the public record,
I find myself believing that there are hardly any..."
— Father Friedrich von Spee, S.J., Cautio Criminalis, 1631

"...Yet as far as Merovingian Gaul is concerned, there is no
evidence to suggest that any of the pagan religions persisted beyond
the fifth century, and there is no pagan religion with a
‘complex set of beliefs and practices reflecting man's attitude
to the supernatural' which can be identified or reconstructed from the
information provided by the sources."
— Yitzhak Hen, doctoral thesis, 1995

[This monograph has a long history. The earliest published draft
appeared in a small, independent radical journal during my sojourn in
Florida in the middle 1980s. I was at that time closely associated
with the OTO, but was not then an initiate member. I had been in close
contact with Wiccan and other Neopagan groups at that time for over a
decade.

I had been a welcome guest in many Neopagan circles, from
Northern California to Southern Florida, and was widely, although
inaccurately, described as a "Neopagan writer" (as in Margot Adler's
Drawing Down the Moon). I was frequently published in the journal of
the Church of All Worlds, Green Egg. Several years later, a revised
and updated version appeared in the first issue of LAShTAL, the
journal of Eulis Lodge OTO, which by then I had joined.

Since that time, the essay has been repeatedly updated and
revised. After I lost my bid for it, the copy of Ye Book of Ye Arte
Magical in the Ripley Collection was sold to a private collector with
pro Wiccan sympathies (or so I have heard) and has disappeared from
view, though I understand each page has been photographed and
will likely appear soon in facsimile, for all to judge for
themselves. I got a VERY good look at it, and expect no serious
surprises.

A bootleg edition of this essay appeared in Canada in 2003. This
version has never before been published before, and was prepared
especially for this anthology. It was one of the editor's
selections—I claim no connection to, or responsibility for any
of the other selections published here, any more than I do for the
choice of titles of the volume itself. But this essay is a product of
some nearly twenty years of research and revision on my part. There
are conjectures that might be wrong, and certainly satirical points
not intended to be taken at face value, but it is a carefully
measured, honest appraisal of the origins of "the old religion" as it
has called itself, or Wicca. It is not an attack on a system of
beliefs.

My bottom line is that Wicca is not related historically in
any way other than literary inspiration to any aboriginal pagan
religion. It is, in fact, a product of the 1930s and '40s,
hugely influenced by the rituals of Freemasonry, the Hermetic Order of
the Golden Dawn, and the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO). It, in fact, is a
errant direct descendent of an OTO encampment in London chartered by
Aleister Crowley, then the OTO Grand Master General, and under
direction of Crowley's student and would-be successor, Gerald
Gardner. It is interesting to observe that Crowley's Acting Master of
Agape Lodge OTO in America in the same period also wrote extensively a
few years later on a "revival of witchcraft".

The present revision includes newer insights into the early claims
concerning Gerald Gardner relative to his status in the OTO. Several
letters published by Bill Heidrick, International Grand Treasurer
General of the OTO, exchanged between Lady Frieda Harris and both Karl
Germer and Frederic Mellinger, immediately after Aleister Crowley's
death, add new insight. Br. Heidrick was kind enough to provide me
with copies of these letters in my preparations for the previous
revision of this essay. There is also an important letter by Gerald
Gardner to Vernon Symmonds, written during the same period. A copy of
the latter was kindly provided by Sabazius X°, the present
U.S. Grand Master General of the OTO. I have also carefully examined
the correspondence between Crowley and the Gnostic Bishop W.B. Crow,
in which Crowley explicitly refers to Gardner's encampment, indicating
it had a future as an OTO Lodge and urging Crow to work with it.

I have additionally had occasion to closely examine the
aforementioned writings of John Whiteside Parsons on the subject of
modern witchcraft, written during at the end of the same period. It is
of more than passing interest that Ye Book of Ye Arte Magical, the OTO
Charter granted to Gerald Gardner by Aleister Crowley, the writings by
Parsons on witchcraft, the publication of High Magic's Aid and the
public emergence of Wicca all date from the same period, circa
1945-1950.]

Origins In Dreamland

Having spent the day musing over the origins of the modern
witchcraft, I had a vivid dream. It seemed to be a cold January
afternoon, and Aleister Crowley was having Gerald Gardner over to
tea. It was 1945, and talk of an early end to the war was in the
air. An atmosphere of optimism prevailed in the free world, but the
wheezing old Magus was having none of it.

"Nobody is interested in magick any more!" Crowley ejaculated. "My
friends on the Continent are dead or in exile, or grown old; the
movement in America is in shambles. I've seen my best candidates turn
against me ... Achad, Regardie ... even that gentleman out in
California, what's - his - name, AMORC, the one that made all the
money.."

"O, bosh, Crowley," Gardner waved his hand impatiently, "all things
considered, you've done pretty well for yourself. Why, you've been
called the 'wickedest man in the world' and by more than a
few. And you've not, if you'll pardon the impertinence, done too badly
with the ladies."

Crowley coughed, tugged on his pipe reflectively. "You know" he
finally ventured, "it's like I've been trying to tell this boy
Grant. A restrictive Order is not enough. If I had it all to do over
again, I would've built a religion for the unwashed masses instead of
just a secret society. Why, the opportunities! The women! Poor dimwit
kid; he just doesn't get the point. Believes the mumbo-jumbo, I
fear. I believe he reads Lovecraft or Poe or one of those other
unsavory American fantasists too much. But you, Brother Gardner, you
get what is needed."

Gardner smiled. "Precisely. And that is what I have come to propose
to you. Take your Book of the Law, your Gnostic
Mass. Add a little razzle-dazzle for the unwashed country
folk. Why I know these occultists who call themselves 'witches'. They
dance around fires naked, get drunk, have a good time. Rosicrucians, I
think. Proper English country squires and dames, mostly. If I could
persuade you to draw on your long experience and talents, in no time
at all we could invent a popular cult that would have beautiful ladies
clamoring to let us strip them naked, tie them up and spank their
behinds! If, Mr. Crowley, you'll excuse my explicitness."

For all his infirmity, Aleister Crowley almost sprang to his feet,
a little of the old energy flashing through his loins. "By George,
Gardner, you've got something there, I should think! I could license
you to initiate people into the O.T.O. today, and you could form the
nucleus of such a group!"

He paced in agitation. "Yes, yes," he mused, half to Gardner, half
to himself. "The Book. The Mass. I could write some rituals. An
'ancient book' of magick. A 'book of shadows'. Priestesses, naked
girls. Yes. By Jove, yes!"

Great story, but merely a dream, created out of bits and pieces of
rumor, history and imagination. Don't be surprised, though, if a year
or five years from now you read it as 'history'. There have been more
post mortem sightings of Elvis than the entire New Testament's reports
of post mortem sightings of Jesus. In some new learned text on the
fabled history of Wicca, you may read about Crowley and Gardner and
spankings and naked witches. Such is the way all mythologies come into
being.

Please don't misunderstand me here; I use the word 'mythology' in
this context in its aboriginal meaning, and with considerable
respect. History is, in my experience, more metaphor than factual
accounting at best, and there are myths by which we live and others by
which we die. Myths are the dreams and visions which parallel
objective history. The myth-dream is the base out of which all great
movements and ideals seem to emerge. Myths are not facts, but at times
they may be more important than facts.

To arrive at some perspective on what the modern mythos called,
variously, "Wicca", the "Old Religion", "Witchcraft" and "Neopaganism"
is, we must firstly make a solid distinction; "witchcraft" in the
popular informally defined sense may have little to do with the modern
religion that goes by the same name. It has been argued by defenders
of and formal apologists for modern Wicca that it is a direct lineal
descendent of an ancient, indeed, prehistoric worldwide folk
religion.

Some proponents hedge their claims, calling Wicca a "revival" rather
than a continuation of an ancient cult. Oddly enough, there may never
have been any such cult! The first time I met someone who thought she
was a witch, she started going on about being a "blue of the cloak." I
should've been warned right then and there. I merely rolled my
eyes.

In fact, as time has passed and the religion has spread, the claims
of lineal continuity have tended to be hedged more and more. Thus, we
find Dr. Gardner himself, in 1954, stating unambiguously that some
witches are descendants "... of a line of priests and priestesses of
an old and probably Stone Age religion, who have been initiated in a
certain way (received into the circle) and become the recipients of
certain ancient learning." (Gardner, Witchcraft Today,
pp. 33-34.)

Stated in its most extreme form, Wicca may be defined as an ancient
pagan religious system of beliefs and practices, with a form of
'apostolic' succession (that is, with knowledge and ordination handed
on linearly from generation to generation), a more or less consistent
set of rites and myths, and even a secret holy book of considerable
antiquity (The Book of Shadows). Beliefs or convictions, a coherent
clergy and a holy text or texts are the characteristics that identify
virtually all religious movements. The question of antiquity and
lineal continuity is another matter.

More recent writers, as we have noted, have hedged a good deal on
these claims where Wicca is concerned. Thus we find Stewart Farrar in
1971 musing on the purported ancient text thusly: "Whether, therefore,
the whole of the Book of Shadows is post-1897 is anyone's guess. Mine
is that, like the Bible, it is a patchwork of periods and sources, and
that since it is copied and re-copied by hand, it includes amendments,
additions, and stylistic alterations according to the taste of a
succession of copiers...Parts of it I sense to be genuinely old; other
parts suggest modern interpolation..." (Farrar, What Witches
Do, pp. 34-35) As we shall discover presently, there appear to be
no genuinely old copies of the Book of Shadows.

Still, as to the mythos, Farrar informs us that the "two
personifications of witchcraft are the Horned God and the Mother
Goddess..." (ibid., p 29) and that the "Horned God is not the Devil,
and never has been. If today 'Satanist' covens do exist, they are not
witches but a sick fringe, delayed-reaction victims of a centuries-old
Church propaganda in which even intelligent Christians no longer
believe..." (ibid., p 32).

If one is then to protest, 'very well, some case might be made for the
Horned God being mistaken for the Christian Devil (or should that be the other
way around?), but what record, prior to the advent 50 years ago of modern Wicca
via Gerald Gardner, do we have of the intact survival of a mother goddess image
from ancient times?

Wiccan apologists frequently refer to the (apparently isolated)
tenth century Church document which states that "some wicked women,
perverted by the Devil, seduced by the illusions and phantasms of
demons, believe and profess themselves in the hours of the night to
ride upon certain beasts with Diana, the goddess of pagans, or with
Herodias, and an innumerable multitude of women, and in the silence of
the dead of night to traverse great spaces of earth, and to obey her
commands as of their mistress, and to be summoned to her service on
certain nights." (Quoted in Valiente, Witchcraft For Tomorrow,
Hale, 1978, p 32. and by Kramer and Sprenger in the Montague Summers'
translation of The Hammer Of Witches.) This document dates from
early post-Roman Europe. Some form of intact quasi pagan folk beliefs
did survive through this period; even as late as the High Middle Ages
it survived among the Vikings of Northern Europe. Human Sacrifice was
practiced at Old Uppsala well into the High Middle Ages. However, the
historical record in Europe and later in the Americas generally
suggests that, once Christian missionaries began to proselytize in a
given area, conversion was astonishingly rapid and pagan beliefs and
even most customs rapidly faded. In more recent times, the total
conversion in a single generation documented in Mexico and Peru
following the Spanish conquest provides substantial proof of the
thoroughness of this process. In earlier times, such works as Yitzhak
Hen's Culture And Religion In Merovingian Gaul A.D. 481-751
show the same pattern of rapid conversion, not just in name but in
substance, both in the cities and the countryside. Of course some
customs and folklore from paleopagan times exist worldwide, but there
has never been any evidence of a link to modern Wicca, other than a
literary one. In the mystical sense, a Piscean religion best suited a
Piscean Aeon, and Christianity offered answers to the questions of
death and morality in a spiritual context poorly dealt with in both
the State Pagan Religion of Rome and the Celtic, Germanic and other
folk beliefs of Europe. Christianity prevailed because it better met
the needs of the times in which it grew and prospered. It is
characteristic of all ideologies either the rise, prosper, decline and
fall, or, alternately, radically mutate. The pagan religions of the
pre-Roman world simply did not evolve into something that met the
spiritual needs of the imperial and medieval eras in which
Christianity and later Islam entered the marketplace of ideas. Morris
dancing and maypoles aside, what remained of predecessor cults are
largely a grab-bag of mythical early saints and the Easter Bunny. But
eggs and bunny rabbits do not a religion make.

Farrar, for his part, explains the lack of references to a goddess
in the testimony at the infamous witch trials by asserting that "the
judges ignored the Goddess, being preoccupied with the Satan-image of
the God ..." (What Witches Do, p 33). Unfortunately for this
school of thought, it is the evidence of that reign of terror which
lasted from roughly 1484 to 1692 which brings the whole idea of a
surviving religious cult into question. Largely discredited
authorities such as Dr. Margaret Murray to the contrary, the
conventional wisdom on the witch burning mania which swept like a
plague over much of Europe during the transition from medieval world
to modern is that it was just that; a mania, a delusion in the minds
of Christian clergymen and state authorities; that is, there were no
witches, only the innocent victims of the witch hunt. Further, this
humanist argument goes, the 'witchcraft' of Satanic worship,
broomstick riding, of Sabats and Devil-marks, was a rather late
invention, borrowing but little from remaining memories of actual pre
Christian paganism. We have seen that the infamous inquisitors Kramer
and Springer knew full well the early account mentioned above, and
classical paganism as a literary knowledge has never been
forgotten. We saw a resurrection of this mania in the 1980s flurry
over 'Satanic sacrificial' cults, with as little evidence. The story
still gets retold in the 21st Century on occasion, in fresh form.

"The concept of the heresy of witchcraft was frankly regarded as a
new invention, both by the theologians and by the public," writes
Dr. Rossell Hope Robbins in The Encyclopedia Of Witchcraft &
Demonology, (Crown, 1959, p.9) "Having to hurdle an early church law,
the Canon Episcopi, which said in effect that belief in witchcraft was
superstitious and heretical, the inquisitors caviled by arguing that
the witchcraft of the Canon Episcopi and the witchcraft of the
Inquisition were different..."

The evidence extracted under the most gruesome and repeated
tortures resemble the Wiccan religion of today in only the most
superficial fashion. Though Wicca may have been framed with the
"confessions" extracted by victims of the inquisitors in mind, those
"confessions" —which are more than suspect, to begin with,
bespeak a cult of devil worshipers dedicated to evil.

One need only read a few of the accounts of the time to realize
that, had there been at the time a religion of the Goddess and God, of
seasonal circles and The Book of Shadows, such would likely have been
blurted out by the victims, and more than once. The agonies of the
accused were, almost literally, beyond the imagination of those of us
who have been fortunate enough to escape them.

The witch mania went perhaps unequaled in the annals of crimes
against humanity en masse until the Hitlerian brutality of the last
century. But, no such confessions were forthcoming, though the
wretches accused, before the torture was done, would also be compelled
to condemn their own parents, spouses, loved ones, even children. They
confessed, and to anything the inquisitors wished, anything to stop or
reduce the pain.

A Priest, probably at risk to his own life, recorded testimony in
the 1600s that reflected the reality underlying the forced
"confessions" of "witches". Rev. Michael Stapirius records, for
example, this comment from one "confessed witch": "I never dreamed
that by means of the torture a person could be brought to the point of
telling such lies as I have told. I am not a witch, and I have never
seen the devil, and still I had to plead guilty myself and denounce
others...." All but one copy of Father Stapirius' book were destroyed,
and little wonder.

A letter smuggled from a German burgomaster, Johannes Junius, to
his daughter in 1628, is as telling as it is painful even to read. His
hands had been virtually destroyed in the torture, and he wrote only
with great agony and no hope. "When at last the executioner led me
back to the cell, he said to me, 'Sir, I beg you, for God's sake,
confess something, whether it be true or not. Invent something, for
you cannot endure the torture which you will be put to; and, even if
you bear it all, yet you will not escape, not even if you were an
earl, but one torture will follow another until you say you are a
witch. Not before that,' he said, 'will they let you go, as you may
see by all their trials, for one is just like another...'" (ibid.,
pp. 12-13)

For the graspers at straws, we may find an occasional line in a
"confession" which is intriguing, as in the notations on the
"confession" of one woman from Germany dated in late 1637. After days
of unspeakable torment, wherein the woman confesses under pain,
recants when the pain is removed, only to be moved by more pain to
confess again, she is asked: "How did she influence the weather? She
does not know what to say and can only whisper, Oh, Heavenly Queen,
protect me!"

Was the victim calling upon "the Goddess"? It seems far more
likely, in my judgment, that she was calling upon that transfiguration
of all ancient goddesses in Christian mythology, the Virgin Mary. One
more quote from Dr. Robbins, and I will cease to parade late medieval
history before you.

It comes from yet another priest, Father Cornelius Loos, who
observed, in 1592 that "Wretched creatures are compelled by the
severity of the torture to confess things they have never done, and so
by cruel butchery innocent lives are taken....." (ibid., p 16). The
"evidence" of the witch trials indicates, on the whole, neither the
Satanism the church and state would have us believe, nor the pagan
survivals now claimed by modern Wicca; rather, they suggest only fear,
greed, human brutality carried out to bizarre extremes that have few
parallels in all of history. But, the brutality is not that of
'witches' nor even of 'Satanists' but rather that of the Christian
Church, and the government.

What, then, are we to make of modern Wicca? It must, of course, be
observed as an aside that in a sense witchcraft or "wisecraft" has,
indeed, been with us from the dawn of time, not as a coherent religion
or set of practices and beliefs, but as the folk magic and medicine
that stretches back to early, possibly Paleolithic tribal shamans on
to modern China's so-called "barefoot doctors". But this is folklore
and folkcraft, not a religion.

In another sense, we can also say that ceremonial magick, as I have
previously noted, has had a place in history for a very long time, and
both these ancient systems of belief and practice have intermingled in
the lore of modern Wicca, as apologists are quick to claim.

But, to an extent, this misses the point and skirts an essential
question anyone has the right to ask about modern Wicca—namely,
did Wicca exist as a coherent creed, a distinct form of spiritual
expression, prior to the 1940s; that is, prior to the meeting of minds
between the old magus and venerable prophet of the occult world
Aleister Crowley, and the first popularizer, if not outright inventor
of modern Wicca, Gerald Brosseau Gardner?

There is certainly no doubt that bits and pieces of ancient
paganism survived into modern times in folklore and, for that matter,
in the very practices and beliefs of Christianity.

Further, there appears to be some evidence that 'Old George'
Pickingill and others were practicing some form of Satanic folk magick
as early as the latter part of the 19th century, though even this has
recently been brought into question. Wiccan writers have made much of
this in the past, but just what 'Old George' was doing is subject to
much debate.

Doreen Valiente, an astute Wiccan writer and one-time intimate of
the late Dr. Gardner (and, in fact, the author of some rituals now
thought by others to be of "ancient origin"), says of Pickingill that
so "fierce was 'Old George's dislike of Christianity that he would
even collaborate with avowed Satanists..." (Tomorrow, p
20). What George Pickingill was doing is simply not clear. That it was
not the religion identified today as "Wicca" is much clearer.

He is said to have had some interaction with a host of figures in
the occult revival of the late nineteenth century, including perhaps
even Crowley and his teacher Bennett. It seems possible that Gardner,
about the time of meeting Crowley, had some involvement with groups
stemming from Pickingill's earlier activities, but it is only
after Crowley and Gardner meet that we begin to see anything
resembling the modern spiritual communion that has become known as
Wicca.

"Witches," wrote Gardner in 1954, "are consummate leg-pullers; they
are taught it as part of their stock-in-trade." (Witchcraft
Today, p 27) Modern apologists both of Aleister Crowley AND Gerald
Gardner have taken on such serious tones as well as pretensions that
they may be missing places where tongues are firmly jutting against
cheeks.

Both men were believers in fleshly fulfillment, not only as an end
in itself but, as in the Tantric Yoga of the East, as a means of
spiritual attainment. A certain prudishness has crept into the
practices of post Gardnerian Wiccans, especially in America since the
1960s, along with a certain pseudo feminist revisionism. This has
succeeded to a considerable extent in converting a libertine sex cult
into a rather staid Neopuritanism.

The original Gardnerian current is still well enough known and
widely enough in vogue (in Britain and Ireland especially) that one
can venture to assert that what Gardnerian Wicca is all about is the
same thing Crowley was attempting with a more narrow, more
intellectual constituency with the magical orders under his direct
influence.

These Orders had flourished for some time, but by the time Crowley
"officially" met Gardner in the 1940s, much of the former's lifelong
efforts had, if not totally disintegrated, were then operating at a
diminished and diminishing level.

Through his long and fascinating career as Magus and organizer,
there is some reason to believe that Crowley periodically may have
wished for, or even attempted to, create a more populist expression of
magical religion. The Gnostic Mass, which Crowley wrote fairly
early-on, had come since his death to somewhat fill this function
through the OTO-connected but (for a time) semi-autonomous Gnostic
Catholic Church (EGC, Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica).

As we shall see momentarily, one of Crowley's key followers was
publishing manifestos forecasting the revival of witchcraft at the
same time Gardner was being chartered by Crowley to organize an OTO
encampment. The OTO itself, since Crowley's time, has taken on a more
popular image and a considerably larger membership, and is somewhat
less elitist and more oriented towards international organizational
efforts, thanks largely to the work under the Caliphate of the late
Grady McMurtry, an American direct student of Crowley's. This
contrasts sharply with the very internalized OTO that barely survived
during the McCarthy Era, when the late Karl Germer was in charge, and
the OTO turned inward for two decades. (On the other hand, Germer when
seen less as an active Grand Master and more as a Conservator of ideas
and rites in a "dark age" comes off a good deal better.)

The famous Ancient and Mystic Order of the Rose Cross (AMORC), the
highly successful mail-order spiritual fellowship, was an OTO
offspring in Crowley's time. It has been claimed that Kenneth Grant
and Aleister Crowley were discussing relatively radical changes in the
Ordo Templi Orientis at approximately the same time that Gardner and
Crowley were interactive. Indeed, Crowley's correspondence and
conversations with his eventual successor Grady McMurtry suggest that
in his last years the old Magus envisioned the need for a new
generation of leaders with new ideas. Gardner was never a designated
Crowley successor, but he was certainly on Crowley's 'short list' at
the end of World War Two.

Though Wiccan writers give some lip service (and, no doubt, some
sincere credence) to the notion that the validity of Wiccan ideas
doesn't depend upon its lineage, the suggestion that Wicca is —
or, at least, started out to be — essentially a late attempt at
popularizing the secrets of ritual and sexual magick Crowley
promulgated through the OTO and his writings, seems to evoke
nervousness, if not hostility.

One notes gross animosity or a certain culpable nervousness. We
hear from Wiccan writer and leader Raymond Buckland that one "of the
suggestions made is that Aleister Crowley wrote the rituals ... but no
convincing evidence has been presented to back this assertion and, to
my mind, it seems extremely unlikely ..." (Gardner, ibid.,
introduction) The Wiccan rituals I have seen DO have much of Crowley
in them. Yet, as we shall see in presently, the explanation that
'Crowley wrote the rituals for Gardner' turns out to be somewhat in
error. But it is on the right track.

Doreen Valiente attempts to invoke Crowley's alleged infirmity at
the time of his acquaintance with Gardner:

"It has been stated by Francis King in his Ritual Magic In
England that Aleister Crowley was paid by Gerald Gardner to write
the rituals of Gardner's new witch cult...Now, Gerald Gardner never
met Aleister Crowley until the very last years of the latter's life,
when he was a feeble old man living at a private hotel in Hastings,
being kept alive by injections of drugs... If, therefore, Crowley
really invented these rituals in their entirety, they must be about
the last thing he ever wrote. Was this enfeebled and practically dying
man really capable of such a tour de force? "

The obvious answer, as the late Dr. Israel Regardie's introduction
to the posthumously published collection of Crowley's letters,
Magick Without Tears, implies, would be yes. Crowley continued
to produce extraordinary material almost to the end of his life, and
much of what I have seen of the "Wiccan Crowley" is, in any case, of
earlier origin. I have read a letter written by Crowley in September
of 1947 which is sound, coherent and to the point. From Lady Freida
Harris's description, it would seem that Crowley was quite in control
until the last few days of his life, at the end of that year. He was
elderly, quite ill and passed on. Only a few months earlier he had
busily been coaching Gardner on the proposed London OTO body, and
writing serious letters to his remaining students.

Gerald Gardner is himself not altogether silent on the subject. In
Witchcraft Today (p 47), Gardner asks himself, with what degree
of irony one can only guess at, who, in modern times, could have
invented the Wiccan rituals. "The only man I can think of who could
have invented the rites," he offers, "was the late Aleister Crowley
... possibly he borrowed things from the cult writings, or more likely
someone may have borrowed expressions from him ..." A few legs may be
being pulled here, and perhaps more than a few.

As a prophet ahead of his time, as a poet and dreamer of daring
dreams, Crowley is one of the outstanding figures of the twentieth (or
any) century. As an organizer, he was almost as much of a calamity as
he was at managing his own finances ... and personal life. As I
understand the liberatory nature of the magical path, one would do
well to see the difference between Crowley the prophet of Thelema and
Crowley the insolvent and awkward administrator.

Crowley very much lacked the common touch; Gardner was above all
things a popularizer. Both men have been reviled as lecherous "dirty
old men" — Crowley, as a seducer of women and a homosexual, a
drug addict and 'Satanist' rolled together.

Gardner was, they would have it, a voyeur, exhibitionist and
bondage freak with a 'penchant for ritual' to borrow a line from
The Story Of O. Both were, in reality, spiritual libertines
with a purpose, ceremonial magicians who did not shy away from the
awesome force of human sexuality and its potential for spiritual
transformation as well as physical gratification.

I will not say with finality at this point whether Wicca is an
outright invention of these two divine mountebanks and magi. If so,
more power to them, and to those who truly follow in their path. I do
know that, between 1945 and 1947, Crowley met with Gardner, and gave
him license to organize an OTO encampment. This was, as it turns out,
a serious effort by Crowley to establish a new OTO presence in
Britain. As late as May of 1947 we have seen letters from Crowley to
one of his key associates urging the latter to send his followers in
London to Dr. Gardner so that they might receive proper initiation in
OTO through Gardner's OTO Camp, which Crowley anticipated being in
operation in a matter of weeks. After Crowley's death his close
collaborator, Lady Harris, thought Gardner to be Crowley's successor
as head of the OTO in Europe. Gardner claimed as much himself. See
below.

Shortly thereafter, the public face of Wicca came into view, and
that is what I know of the matter: I presently am the designated
curator of Gardner's certificate of license to organize said OTO camp,
signed and sealed by Aleister Crowley. The certificate and its import
are examined in connection with my personal search for the original
Book of Shadows in the next section of this narrative.

For now, though, let us note in the years since Crowley chartered
Gardner to organize a magical encampment, Wicca has both grown in
popularity and become, to my mind, something far less real than
either Gardner or Crowley could have wanted or foreseen. Wherever they
came from, the rites and practices which came from or through Gerald
Gardner were strong, and tapped into that archetypal reality, that
level of consciousness beneath the mask of polite society and
conventional wisdom which is the function of True Magick.

At a popular level, this was the "Tantric" Sex Magick of the West.
Whether this primordial access has been lost to us will depend on the
awareness, the awakening or lack thereof among practitioners of the
near to middle-near future. Carried to its end Gardnerian practices,
like Crowley's magick, are not merely exotic; they are, in the truest
sense, subversive and transformative.

Practices that work are of value, whether they are two years
old or two thousand. Practices, myths, institutions and obligations
which, on the other hand, may be infinitely ancient are of no value at
all unless they work.

The Devil, you say

Before we move on, though, in light of the furor over real and
imagined "Satanism" that has overtaken parts of the popular press in
recent decades on an on again, off again basis, I would feel a bit
remiss in this account if I did not take momentary note of that other
strain of left-handed occult mythology, Satanism. Wiccans are correct
when they say that modern Wicca is not Satanic, that Satanism is
"reverse Christianity" whereas Wicca is a separate, non Christian
religion.

Still, it should be noted, so much of our society has been grounded
in the repressiveness and authoritarian moralism of what passes for
Christianity that a liberal dose of "counter Christianity" is to be
expected, if not welcomed. The Pat Robertsons of the world make
possible the Anton LeVays. In the long history of repressive religion,
a certain fable of Satanism has arisen. It constitutes a mythos of its
own. No doubt, misguided 'copycat' fanatics have sometimes misused
this mythos, in much the same way that Charles Manson misused the
music and culture of the 1960s.

True occult initiates have always regarded the Ultimate Reality as
beyond all names and description. Named 'deities' are, therefore,
largely symbols. "Isis" is a symbol of the long-denied female
component of deity to some occultists. "Pan" or "The Horned God" or
"Set" or even "Satan" are symbols of unconscious, repressed sexuality;
hot, primal and as raw as the scorch of the desert Sun a midday. To
the occultist, there is no Devil, no "god of evil." There is,
ultimately, only the Ain Sof Aur of the Qabala; the limitless light of
which we are but a frozen spark. Evil, in this system, is the mere
absence of light. All else is illusion.

The goal of the occult path of initiation is balance. In
Freemasonry and High Magick, the symbols of the White Pillar and Black
Pillar represent this balance between conscious and unconscious
forces.

In Gardnerian Wicca, the Goddess and Horned God - and the Priestess
and Priest, represent that balance. There is nothing, nothing whatever
of pacts with the "Devil" or the worship of evil in any of this; that
belongs to misguided ex Christians who have been given the absurd
fundamentalist Sunday school notion that one must choose the exoteric
Christian version of God, or choose the Devil. Judaism, Mormonism,
and even Catholicism have at one time or another been thought
"Satanic," and occultists have merely played on this bigoted
symbolism, not subscribed to it.

As we have seen, Wicca since Gardner's time has been watered down
in many of its expressions into a kind of mushy white-light 'New Age'
religion, with far less of the strong sexuality characteristic of
Gardnerian Wicca, though, also, sometimes with less pretense as
well.

In any event, Satanism has popped up now and again through much of
the history of the Christian Church. The medieval witches were not
likely to have been Satanists, as the Church would have it, but, as we
have seen, neither were they likely to have been "witches" in the
Wiccan sense, either.

The Hellfire Clubs of the Eighteenth Century were mockingly
Satanic, and groups like the Process Church of the Final Judgment do,
indeed, have Satanic elements in their (one should remember)
essentially low-church fundamentalist Christian theology.

Aleister Crowley, ever theatrical, was prone to use Satanic
symbolism in much the same way, tongue jutting in cheek, as he was
given to saying that he "sacrificed hundreds of children each year,"
that is, that he was sexually active. Crowley once called a press
conference at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, where he announced
that he was burning his British Passport to protest Britain's
involvement in World War One or (in another version) Britain's
repression of Ireland. He tossed an empty envelope into the water. He
was, in fact, probably at that time a part-time British intelligence
agent trying to bring the United States into World War One on the
British side.

The most popular form of "counter Christianity" to emerge in modern
times, though, was the late Anton Szandor LaVey's San Francisco-based
Church of Satan, founded April 30, 1966. LaVey's Church enjoyed an
initial burst of press interest, grew to a substantial size as a kind
of swinger's club with occult trappings, and appeared to maintain
itself during the cultural decay of the 1970s. But LaVey's books,
The Satanic Bible and The Satanic Rituals, have remained
in print for many years, and his ideas seem to enjoy a periodic
renewal of interest, especially among younger people, goths and heavy
metal fans with a death-wish mostly, beginning in the middle years of
the 1980s. By that time the Church of Satan had become more
decentralized and was largely succeeded — ideologically if not
numerically — by the Temple of Set. The movement has outlived
LeVay. But his "Satanism", one should remember, is pure theater or
psychodrama; more in the nature of acting-out psychotherapy than
religion.

It is interesting to note Francis King's observation that before
the Church of Satan began LaVey was involved in an occult group which
included, among others, underground film maker Kenneth Anger, a person
well known in Crowley circles. Of the rites of the Church of Satan,
King states that "...most of its teachings and magical techniques were
somewhat vulgarized versions of those of Aleister Crowley's Ordo
Templi Orientis." (Man Myth And Magic, p 3204.) To which we
might add that, as with the OTO, the rites of the Church of Satan and
Temple of Set are manifestly potent in their primal energy, but hardly
criminal or murderous. At their worst, they are merely silly.

LaVey, like Gardner and unlike Crowley, appears to have had "the
common touch" — perhaps rather more so than Gardner. This
attraction was, however, caught up in the hedonism of the 1970s, and
has little to say by the end of the 20th Century.

I determined to trace the Wiccan rumor to its source. As we shall
see, in the very year I "fell" into being a Gnostic Bishop, I also
fell into the original charters, rituals and paraphernalia of
Wicca.

The Charter And The Book

Being A Radical Revisionist History of the Origins of the Modern
Witch Cult and The Book of Shadows.

"G. B. Gardner . . . is head of the O.T.O. in Europe." Lady Frieda
Harris, letter to Karl Germer, January 2, 1948

"It was one of the secret doctrines of paganism that the Sun was the
source, not only of light, but of life. The invasion of classical
beliefs by the religions of Syria and Egypt which were principally
solar, gradually affected the conception of Apollo, and there is a
certain later identification of him with the suffering God of
Christianity, Freemasonry and similar cults"
— Aleister Crowley in Astrology, 1974

"if GBG and Crowley only knew each other for a short year or two,
do you think that would be long enough for them to become such good
friends that gifts of personal value would be exchanged several times,
and that GBG would have been able to acquire the vast majority of
Crowley's effects after his death?"
— Merlin the Enchanter, personal letter, 1986

"...On the floor before the altar, he remembers a sword with a
flat cruciform brass hilt, and a well-worn manuscript book of rituals
- the hereditary Book of Shadows, which he will have to copy out for
himself in the days to come..."
— Stewart Farrar in What Witches Do, 1971

"...the Gardnerian Book of Shadows is one of the key factors in what has
become a far bigger and more significant movement than Gardner can have envisaged;
so historical interest alone would be enough reason for defining it while first-hand
evidence is still available..."

Janet and Stewart Farrar in The Witches' Way, 1984

"It has been alleged that a Book of Shadows in Crowley's hand-writing
was formerly exhibited in Gerald's Museum of Witchcraft on the Isle of
Man. I can only say I never saw this on either of the two occasions when I stayed
with Gerald and Donna Gardner on the island. The large, handwritten book depicted
in Witchcraft Today is not in Crowley's handwriting, but Gerald's..."
Doreen Valiente in Witchcraft for Tomorrow, 1978

"Aidan Kelly. . . labels the entire Wiccan revival 'Gardnerian Witchcraft
. . . ' The reasoning and speculation in Aidan's book are intricate.
Briefly, his main argument depends on his discovery of one of Gardner's
working notebooks, Ye Book of Ye Art Magical, which is in possession of Ripley
International, Ltd......" Margot Adler in Drawing Down the Moon, 1979

Waiting For The Man From Canada

I was, for the third time in four years, waiting a bit nervously
for the Canadian executive with the original Book of Shadows in the
ramshackle office of Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum.

"They're at the jail," a smiling secretary-type explained, "but
we've called them and they should be back over here to see you in just
a few minutes."

The jail? Ah, St. Augustine, Florida. "The Old Jail," was the
'nation's oldest city's' second most tasteless tourist trap, complete
with cage-type cells and a mock gallows. For a moment I allowed myself
to play in my head with the vision of Norm Deska, Ripley Operations
Vice President and John Turner, the General Manager of Ripley's local
operation and the guy who'd bought the Gerald Gardner collection from
Gardner's niece, Monique Wilson, sitting in the slammer. But no,
Turner apparently had just been showing Deska the town. I straightened
my ice cream suit for the fiftieth time, and suppressed the
comment. We were talking BIG history here, and big bucks, too. I
gulped. The original Book of Shadows. Maybe.

It had started years before. One of the last people in America to
be a fan of carnival sideshows, I was anxious to take another
opportunity to go through the almost archetypally seedy old home that
housed the original Ripley's Museum.

I had known that Ripley had, in the nineteen seventies, acquired
the Gardner stuff, but as far as I knew it was all located at their
Tennessee resort museum. I think I'd heard they'd closed it down. By
then, the social liberalism of the early seventies was over, and
witchcraft and sorcery were no longer in keeping with a 'family style'
museum. It featured a man with a candle in his head, a Tantric skull
drinking cup and freak show stuff like that, but, that, apparently,
was deemed suitable family fun.

I was a bit surprised, then, when I discovered some of the Gardner
stuff - including an important historical document, for sale in the
gift shop, in a case just opposite the little alligators that have
"St. Augustine, Florida - America's Oldest City" stickered on their
plastic bellies for the folks back home to use as a paper-weight. The
price tags on the occult stuff, however, were way out of my range.

Back again, three years later, and I decided, what the hell, so I asked the
cashier about the stuff still gathering dust in the glass case, and it was like
I'd pushed some kind of button.

Out comes Mr. Turner, the manager, who whisks us off to a store
room which is filled, filled I tell you, with parts of the
Gardner collection, much of it, if not "for sale" as such, at least
available for negotiation. Mr. Turner told us about acquiring the
collection when he was manager of Ripley's Blackpool operation, how it
had gone over well in the U.S. at first, but had lost popularity and
was now relegated for the most part to storage status.

Visions of sugarplums danced in my head. There were many treasures here, but
the biggest plum of all, I thought, was not surprisingly, not to be seen.

I'd heard all kinds of rumors about the Book of Shadows over the years,
many of them conflicting, all of them intriguing. Rumor #1, of course, is that
which accompanied the birth (or, depending on how one looked at it, the revival)
of modern Wicca, the contemporary successor of ancient fertility cults.

It revolved around elemental rituals, secret rites of passage and a mythos of
goddess and god that seemed attractive to me as a psychologically valid alternative
to the austere, antisexual moralism of fundamentalist Christianity. The Book
of Shadows, in this context, was the 'holy book' of Wicca, copied
out by hand by new initiates of the cult with a history stretching back at least
to the era of witch burnings.

Rumor #2, which I had tended to credit, had it that Gerald Gardner, the 'father
of modern Wicca' had paid Aleister Crowley in his final years to write
the Book of Shadows, perhaps whole cloth. The rumor's chief exponent was
the respected historian of the occult, Francis King.

Rumor #3 had it that Gardner had written the Book himself, which others had
since copied and/or stolen.

To the contrary, said rumor #4, Gardner's Museum had contained an old,
even ancient copy of the Book of Shadows, proving its antiquity.

In more recent years modern Wiccans have tended to put some
distance between themselves and Gardner, just as Gardner, for complex
reasons, tended to distance himself in the early years of Wicca (circa
1944-1954) from the blatant sexual magick of Aleister Crowley, "the
wickedest man in the world" by some accounts, and from Crowley's
organization, the Ordo Templi Orientis . Why Gardner chose to do this
is speculative, but I've got some idea. But, I'm getting ahead of
myself.

While Turner showed me a blasphemous cross shaped from the body of
two nude women (created for the 18th century infamous "Hellfire Clubs"
in England and depicted in the Man Myth and Magic encyclopedia;
I bought it, of course) and a statue of Beelzebub from the dusty
Garderian archives, a thought occurred to me. "You know," I suggested,
"if you ever, in all this stuff, happen across a copy of The Book of
Shadows in the handwriting of Aleister Crowley, it would be of
considerable historical value."

I understated the case. It would be like finding The Book of Mormon
in Joseph Smith's hand, or finding the original Ten Commandments
written not by God Himself, but by Moses, pure and simple. (Better
still, eleven commandments, with a margin note, "first draft.") I
didn't really expect anything to come of it, and in the months ahead,
it didn't.

In the meantime, I had managed to acquire the interesting document
I first mistook for Gerald Gardner's (long acknowledged) initiation
certificate into Crowley's Thelemic magical Ordo Templi Orientis. To
my eventual surprise, I discovered that, not only was this not a
simple initiation certificate for the Minerval (probationary-lowest)
degree, but, to the contrary, was a Charter for Gardner to begin his
own encampment of the O.T.O., and to initiate members into the
O.T.O.

In the document, furthermore, Gardner is referred to as "Prince of
Jerusalem"—that is, he is acknowledged to be a Fourth Degree
Perfect Initiate in the Order. This, needless to say, would usually
imply years of dedicated training. Though Gardner had claimed Fourth
Degree O.T.O. status as early as publication of High Magic's Aid, (and
claimed even higher status in one edition* ) this runs somewhat
contrary to both generally held Wiccan and (then) contemporary O.T.O.
orthodox understandings that the O.T.O. was then fallow in
England.

At the time the document was written, most maintained, Gardner
could have known Crowley for only a brief period, and was not himself
deeply involved in the O.T.O. The document is undated but probably was
drawn up around 1946 or '47.

As I said, it was once understood that no viable chartered body of
the O.T.O. was supposed to exist in England at that time; the only
active Lodge was in California, and is the direct antecedent of the
contemporary authentic Ordo Templi Orientis. Karl Germer, Crowley's
immediate successor, had been imprisoned in a Concentration Camp
during the War, his mere association with Crowley being deemed
'criminal freemasonry'. But Crowley himself clearly expected Gardner
to establish an OTO Camp, and was referring followers to Gardner for
initiation as late as May of 1947.

The German OTO had been largely destroyed by the Nazis, along with
other Freemasonry-related organizations, and Crowley himself was in
declining health and power, the English OTO virtually dead. A
provincial Swiss branch existed, but was highly insular and tending
towards schism. The Charter also displayed other irregularities of a
revealing nature. Though the signature and seals are certainly those
of Crowley, the text is in the decorative hand of Gerald Gardner! The
complete text reads as follows:

Do what thou wilt shall be the law. We Baphomet X°Ordo Templi
Orientis Sovereign Grand Master General of All English speaking
countries of the Earth do hereby authorise our Beloved Son Scire
(Dr. G, B, Gardner,) Prince of Jerusalem to constitute a camp of the
Ordo Templi Orientis, in the degree Minerval. Love is the Law, Love
under will. Witness my hand and seal Baphomet X°

Leaving aside the misquotation from The Book of the Law ("Do what thou
wilt shall be the Law" instead of "Do what thou wilt shall be the
whole of the Law"), which got by me for some months and probably got
by Crowley when it was presented to him for signature, the document is
definitely authentic. It hung for some time in Gardner's museum,
possibly giving rise, as we shall see, to the rumor that Crowley wrote
the Book of Shadows for Gardner. According to Doreen Valiente, and to
Col. Lawrence as well, the museum's descriptive pamphlet says of this
document:

"The collection includes a Charter granted by Aleister Crowley to G.B.
Gardner (the Director of this Museum) to operate a Lodge of Crowley's
fraternity, the Ordo Templi Orientis. (The Director would like to
point out, however, that he has never used this Charter and has no
intention of doing so, although to the best of his belief he is the
only person in Britain possessing such a Charter from Crowley himself;
Crowley was a personal friend of his, and gave him the Charter because
he liked him.") This was probably written well after Wicca was
developed in the form it is today identified with, at least in
Britain. As I point out elsewhere, Crowley clearly took the Charter
seriously, even openly envisioning it extending to a Lodge to do the
entire "Man of Earth Series" of OTO initiations eventually. Gardner,
for his part, places a different connotation on the Charter at an
earlier time, giving out the impression that it makes him the Grand
Master of the OTO in Europe.

Col. Lawrence ("Merlin the Enchanter"), in a letter to me dated 6
December, 1986, adds that this appeared in Gardner's booklet, The
Museum of Magic and Witchcraft. The explanation for the curious
wording of the text, taking, as Dr. Gardner does, great pains to
distance himself from Crowley and the OTO, may be hinted at in that
the booklet suggests that this display in the "new upper gallery"
(page 24) was put out at a relatively late date when, as we shall
discover, Gardner was making himself answerable to the demands of the
new witch cult and not the long-dead Crowley and (then) relatively
moribund OTO.

Now, the "my friend Aleister" ploy might explain the whole thing.
Perhaps, as some including Ms. Valiente believed, Aleister Crowley was
desperate in his last years to hand on what he saw as his legacy to
someone. He recklessly handed out his literary estate,the story goes,
perhaps gave contradictory instruction to various of his remaining few
devotees (e.g. Kenneth Grant, Grady McMurtry, Karl Germer), and may
have given Gardner an "accelerated advancement" in his order. The
latter might be true; it was common practice for Master Masons to be
inducted into OTO at a rather high level at one time.

There is, however, certainly reason to dispute this. I have read
Crowley's letters to Jack Parsons and to Karl Germer, and others,
including the more famous letters published as Magick Without
Tears and his now celebrated authorizations to Grady McMurtry
— all very late writings indeed, as well as his Last Will and
Testament dated June 19, 1947, only six months prior to his death, and
Crowley seems intent upon an orderly process of transition of his
minor financial estate and, more importantly, his substantial literary
estate, to the OTO leadership which, he leaves no doubt in his Will,
falls to Germer, then Grand Treasurer General of the OTO. To the end
he continues to critique what he sees as unsound thinking (letters to
Parsons and Germer in 1946), and to speak of moving to California to
be with Agape Lodge, by then the remaining centerpiece of the OTO, but
also referring to Gardner's Camp in London as a virtual accomplished
fact.

Ms. Valiente, a devoted Wiccan who nevertheless was also a
dedicated seeker after the historical truth, mentions also the claim
made by the late Gerald Yorke to her that Gardner had paid Crowley a
substantial sum for the document. In a letter to me dated 28th
August, 1986, Ms. Valiente tells of a meeting with Yorke "...in London
many years ago and mentioned Gerald's O.T.O. Charter to him, whereon
he told me, 'Well, you know, Gerald Gardner paid old Crowley about
($1500) or so for that...' This may or may not be correct..." Money
or friendship do not explain the Charter. Again, Crowley privately
sent students to Gardner as an OTO bodymaster, and Gardner claimed
both OTO membership and even leadership, the later rather more
wishfully than authorized.

I can tell you of my own knowledge that becoming a Companion of the
Royal Arch of Enoch, Perfect Initiate, Prince of Jerusalem and
Chartered Initiator is, ordinarily, a long and arduous task in the
OTO. If Gardner held said position, and a charter to initiate and an
encampment charter, he was, at the least, a Crowley student and
confidant.

Gardner was in the habit, after the public career of Wicca emerged
in the 1950s, of downgrading any Crowley associations out of his past,
and, as Janet and Stewart Farrar reveal in The Witches' Way (1984, p3)
there are three distinct versions of the Book of Shadows in Gerald
Gardner's handwriting which incorporate successively less material
from Crowley's writings, though the last (termed "Text C" and co
written with Doreen Valiente after 1953) is still heavily influenced
by Crowley and the OTO.

Ms. Valiente has recently uncovered a copy of an old occult
magazine contemporary with High Magic's Aid and from the same
publisher, which discusses an ancient Indian document called "The Book
of Shadows" but apparently totally unrelated to the Wiccan book of the
same name. Valiente acknowledges that the earliest text by Gardner
known to her was untitled, though she refers to it as a "Book of
Shadows."

It seems suspicious timing; did Gardner take over the title from
his publisher's magazine? Ms. Valiente observed to me that the
"...eastern Book of Shadows does not seem to have anything to do with
witchcraft at all ... is this where old Gerald first found the
expression "The Book of Shadows" and adopted it as a more poetical
name for a magical manuscript than, say 'The Grimoire' or 'The Black
Book'... I don't profess to know the answer; but I doubt if this is
mere coincidence ..."

The claim is frequently made by those who wish to 'salvage' a
pre-Gardnerian source of Wiccan materials that there is a 'core' of
'authentic' materials. But, as the Farrars' recently asserted, the
portions of the Book of Shadows "..which changed least between Texts
A, B and C were naturally the three initiation rituals; because these,
above all, would be the traditional elements which would have been
carefully preserved, probably for centuries...."

But what does one mean by "traditional materials?" The three
initiation rites, now much-described in print, all smack heavily of
the crypto-Freemasonic ritual of the Hermetic Order of the Golden
Dawn, the OTO, and the various esoteric NeoRosicrucian groups that
abounded in Britain from about 1885 on, and which were, it is widely
known, the fountainhead of much that is associated with Gardner's
friend Crowley.

The Third Degree ritual, perhaps Wicca's ultimate rite, is,
essentially, a "non symbolic Gnostic Mass", that beautiful, evocative,
erotic and esoteric ritual written and published by Crowley in the
Equinox, after attending a Russian Orthodox Mass in the early part of
the twentieth century. The Gnostic Mass has had far-reaching
influence, and it would appear that the Wiccan Third Degree is one of
the most blatant examples of that influence.

Take, for example, this excerpt from what is perhaps the most
intimate, most secret and most sublime moment in the entire repertoire
of Wicca rituals, the nonsymbolic (that is, overtly sexual) Great Rite
of the Third Degree initiation, as related by Janet and Stewart Farrarn
nnin The Witches' Way (p.34):

The Priest continues: 'O Secret of Secrets, That art hidden in the
being of all lives, Not thee do we adore, For that which adoreth is
also thou. Thou art That, and That am I. [Kiss I am the flame that
burns in the heart of every man, And in the core of every star. I am
life, and the giver of life. Yet therefore is the knowledge of me the
knowledge of death. I am alone, the Lord within ourselves, Whose name
is Mystery of Mysteries.'

Let us be unambiguous as to the importance in Wicca of this ritual;
as the Farrars' put it (p.31) "Third degree initiation elevates a
witch to the highest of the three grades of the Craft. In a sense, a
third-degree witch is fully independent, answerable only to the Gods
and his or her own conscience..." In short, in a manner of speaking
this is all that Wicca can offer a devotee.

With this in mind, observe the following, from Aleister Crowley's Gnostic
Mass (Liber XV), first published in The Equinox about 90 years ago and routinely
performed (albeit in the symbolic form) by me and by many other Bishops, Priests,
Priestesses and Deacons in the OTO and Ecclesia Gnostica (EGC) today. The following
is excerpted from Gems From the Equinox, p. 372, but is widely available in
published form: The Priest:

O secret of secrets that art hidden in the being of all that lives, not Thee
do we adore, for that which adoreth is also Thou. Thou art That, and That am
I. I am the flame that burns in every heart of man, and in the core of every
star. I am Life, and the giver of Life; yet therefore is the knowledge of me
the knowledge of death. I am alone; there is no God where I am.

So, then, where, apart from Freemasonry and the Thelemic tradition of Crowley
and the OTO, is the "traditional material" some Wiccan writers seem
to seek with near desperation? I am not trying to be sarcastic in the least,
but even commonplace self - references used among Wiccans today, such as "the
Craft" or the refrain "so mote it be" are lifted straight
out of Freemasonry (see, for example, Duncan's Ritual of Freemasonry).
As Doreen Valiente notes in her letter to me mentioned before, "...of
course old Gerald was also a member of the Co-Masons, and an ordinary Freemason..."
as well as an OTO member.

THE REAL ORIGIN OF WICCA

We must dismiss with some respect the assertion, put forth by
Margot Adler and others, that "Wicca no longer adheres to the orthodox
mythos of the Book of Shadows."

Many, if not most of those who have been drawn to Wicca in the last
three decades came to it under the spell (if I may so term it) of the
legend of ancient Wicca. If that legend is false, then while
reformists and revisionist apologists (particularly the peculiar
hybrid spawned in the late sixties (under the name "feminist Wicca")
may –as is their right- seek other valid grounds for their
practices, we at least owe it to those who have operated under a
misapprehension to explain the truth, and let the chips fall where
they may.

I believe there is a core of valid experience falling under the
Wiccan-Neopagan heading, but that that core is the same essential
nucleus that lies in the truths exposed by the dreaded bogey-man
Aleister Crowley and the 'wicked' pansexuality of Crowley's Law of
Thelema. That such roots would be not just uncomfortable, but
intolerable to the orthodox traditionalists among the Wiccans, but
even more so among the hybrid feminist "Wiccans" may indeed be an
understatement.

Neopaganism, in a now archaic "hippie" misreading of ecology,
mistakes responsible stewardship of nature for nature worship. Ancient
pagans did not 'worship' nature; to a large extent they were afraid of
it, as has been pointed out to me by genuine folk practitioners. Their
"nature rites" were to propitiate the caprice of the imagined gods,
not necessarily to honor them. The first Neopagan revivalists,
Gardner, Crowley and Dr. Murray, well understood this. Neopagan
Wiccans often, perhaps usually, do not.

In introducing a "goddess element" into their theology, Crowley and
Gardner both understood the yin/yang, male/female fundamental polarity
of the universe. Radical feminist Neopagans have taken this balance
and altered it, however unintentionally, into a political feminist
agenda, centered around a near-monotheistic worship of the female
principle, in a bizarre caricature of patriarchal Christianity.

I do not say these things lightly; I have seen it happen in my own
time. If this be truth, let truth name its own price. I was not
sure, until Norm and John got back from the Old Jail.

A couple of months earlier, scant days after hearing that I was to
become a Gnostic Bishop and thus an heir to a corner of Crowley's
legacy, I had punched on my answering machine, and there was the
unexpected voice of John Turner saying that he had located what seemed
to be the original Book of Shadows in an inventory list, locating it
at Ripley's office in Toronto.

He said he didn't think they would sell it as an individual item,
but he gave me the name of a top official in the Ripley organization,
who I promptly contacted. I eventually made a substantial offer for
the book, sight unseen, figuring there was (at the least) a likelihood
I'd be able to turn the story into a book and get my money back out of
it, to say nothing of the historical import.

But, as I researched the matter, I became more wary, and confused;
Gardner's texts "A" "B" and "C" all seemed to be accounted
for. Possibly, I began to suspect, this was either a duplicate of the
"de-Thelemicised" post-1954 version with segments written by Gardner
and Valiente and copied and recopied (as well as distorted) from hand
to hand since by Wiccans the world over.

Maybe, I mused, Valiente had one copy and Gardner another, the
latter sold to Ripley with the Collection. Or, perhaps it was the
curious notebook discovered by Aidan Kelly in the Ripley files called
Ye Book of Ye Art Magical, the meaning of which was unclear.

While chatting with Ms. Deska, Norm returned from his mission, we
introduced in businesslike fashion, and he told me he'd get the book,
whatever it might be, from the vault.

The vault?! I sat there thinking God knows what. Recently, I'd
gotten a call from Toronto, and it seems the Ripley folks wanted me to
take a look at what they had. I had made a considerable offer, and at
that point I figured I'd had at least a nibble. As it so happened Norm
would be visiting on a routine inspection visit, so it was arranged he
would bring the manuscript with him to the St. Augustine Ripley
offices.

Almost from the minute he placed it in front of me, things began to
make some kind of sense. Clearly, this was Ye Book of Ye Art
Magical. Just as clearly, it was an unusual piece, written largely in
the same hand as the Charter I had obtained earlier — that is,
in the hand of Gerald Gardner. Of this I became certain, because I had
handwriting samples of Gardner, Valiente and Crowley in my
possession. Ms. Valiente had been mindful of this when she wrote me,
on August 8th, 1986:

I have deliberately chosen to write you in longhand, rather than send
a typewritten reply, so that you will have something by which to judge
the validity of the claim you tell me is being made by the Ripley
organisation to have a copy of a "Book of Shadows" in Gerald Gardner's
handwriting and mine. If this is ... "Ye Book of Ye Art Magical,"
... this is definitely in Gerald Gardner's handwriting. Old Gerald,
however, had several styles of handwriting ... I think it is probable
that the whole MS. was in fact written by Gerald, and no other person
was involved; but of course I may be wrong ...

At first glance it appeared to be a very old book, and it suggested
to me where the rumors that a very old, possibly medieval Book of
Shadows had once been on display in Gardner's Museum had emerged
from.

Any casual onlooker might see Ye Book in this light, for the cover
was indeed that of an old volume, with the original title scratched
out crudely on the side and a new title tooled into the leather
cover. The original was some mundane volume, on Asian knives or
something (an interest of Gardner's), but the inside pages had been
removed, and a kind of notebook—almost a journal—had been
substituted.

As far as I could see, no dates appear anywhere in the book. It is
written in several different handwriting styles, although, as noted
above, Doreen Valiente assured me that Gardner was apt to use several
styles. I had the distinct impression this "note-book" had been
written over a considerable period of time, perhaps years, perhaps
even decades. It may, indeed, date from his days in the 1930s when he
linked up with a NeoRosicrucian performance theatrical troupe, that
could have included among its members the legendary Dorothy
Clutterbuck, who set Gardner on the path which led to Wicca.

Thinking on it, what emerges from Ye Book of Ye Art Magical is a
developmental set of ideas. Much of it is straight out of Crowley, but
it is clearly the published Crowley, the old Magus of the OTO and A
A.

Somewhere along the line it hit me that I was not exactly looking
at the "original Book of Shadows" but, perhaps, the outline Gardner
prepared over a long period of time, apparently in secret (since
Valiente, a relatively early initiate of Gardner's, never heard of it
nor saw it, according to her own account, until recent years, about
the time Aidan Kelly unearthed it in the Ripley collection long after
Gardner's death).

Dr. Gardner kept many odd notebooks and scrapbooks that perhaps
would reveal much about his character and motivations. Turner showed
me a Gardner scrapbook in Ripley's store room which was mostly
cheesecake magazine photographs and articles about actresses. Probably
none are so evocative as Ye Book of Ye Art Magical, suspiciously and
suggestively discovered hidden away in the back of an old sofa.

I have the impression it was essentially unknown in and after
Gardner's lifetime, and that by the Summer of 1986 few had seen inside
it; I knew of only Kelly's and my own party. Perhaps the cover had
been seen by some along the line, accounting for the rumor of a "very
old Book of Shadows" in Gardner's Museum.

If someone had seen the charter unquestionably signed by Crowley
("Baphomet") but written by Gerald Gardner, and had gotten a look, as
well, at Ye Book, they might well have concluded that Crowley had
written both, an honest error, but maybe the source of that
long-standing accusation. There is even a notation in the Ripley
catalog attributing the manuscript to Crowley on someone's say-so, but
I have no indication Ripley has any other such book. Finally, if the
notebook is a source book of any religious system, it is not that of
medieval witchcraft, but the Twentieth Century shining sanity of the
famous Magus Aleister Crowley and the Thelemic/Gnostic creed of The
Book of the Law.

As I sat there I read aloud familiar quotations or paraphrases from
published material in the Crowley-Thelemic canon. This is not the
"ancient religion of the Wise" but the modern sayings of "the Beast
666" as Crowley was wont to style himself.

But, does any of this invalidate Wicca as an expression of human
spirituality? It depends on where one is coming from. Certainly, the
foundations of Feminist Wicca and the modern cult of the goddess are
challenged with the fact that the goddess in question is Nuit, her
manifestation the sworn whore, Our Lady Babalon, the Scarlet
Woman. Transform what you will shall be the whole of history, but
this makes what Marx did to Hegel look like slavish
devotion.

What Crowley himself said of this kind of witchcraft is not merely
instructive, but an affront to the conceits of an era.

"The belief in witchcraft," he observed, "was not all
superstition; its psychological roots were sound. Women who are
thwarted in their natural instincts turn inevitably to all kinds of
malignant mischief, from slander to domestic destruction..."

For those who neither worship nor are disdainful of the man who
"made sexuality a god" or, at least, acknowledged it as godlike and
holy, experience must be its own teacher. If Wicca is a sort of errant
Minerval encampment of the OTO, gone far astray and far afield since
the days Crowley gave Gardner a charter he "didn't use" but seemed to
value, and a whole range of rituals and imagery that assault the
senses at their most literally fundamental level; if this is true or
sort of true, Mythos has its place and role, but so, too, does
reality.

WICCA AS AN OTO ENCAMPMENT

It is of more than passing interest that the late Jack Parsons, one
time (Acting) Master of Agape Lodge OTO in California, began writing
extensively of a revival of witchcraft from 1946 on; that is, at about
the time of Crowley and Gardner's acknowledged association. Crowley
referred to Dr. Gardner and his OTO encampment in private
correspondence almost to the time of his death, and spoke of it with
optimism and enthusiasm.

When Lady Harris wrote Karl Germer that she believed Gardner was
the head of the OTO in Europe after Crowley's death, Germer didn't
refute her; he simply indicated he hoped to see Gardner during his
U.S. visit, which he did. Furthermore, as alluded to in the previous
section, Gardner himself claimed in a letter written shortly after
Crowley's death that he was, in fact, the head of the OTO in
Europe.

The letter to Vernon Symonds, sent from Memphis, Tennessee where
Gardner was then resident, and dated December 24, 1947, asserts that "
... Aleister gave me a charter making me head of the O.T.O. in
Europe. Now I want to get any papers about this that Aleister had; he
had some typescript Rituals, I know. I have them, too, but I don't
want his to fall into other people's hands ..." I am editing Gardner's
spelling with great kindness. This claim should be viewed with a
grain of salt, but Lady Harris and Gardner were both intimate Crowley
associates, and this should be kept in mind. The Charter in question
referred to by Gardner is probably the one now under my stewardship
for OTO, the owner and originator of the document. He almost certainly
had no other. It is also noteworthy that Gardner, a ranking
O.T.O. member, was resident in the U.S. at the same time that both he
and Parsons began to discuss 'modern witchcraft'. Both had extensive
correspondence with Crowley and contact with Germer during this
period.

The question of intent looms large in the background of this
inquiry. If I had to guess, I would venture that Gerald Gardner did,
in fact, invent Wicca more or less whole cloth, to be a popularized
version of the OTO. Crowley, and his immediate successor Karl Germer,
who also knew Dr. Gardner, likely set "old Gerald" on what they
intended to be a Thelemic path, aimed at reestablishing at least a
basic OTO encampment in England.

It is also possible, but yet unproved, that, upon expelling Kenneth
Grant from the OTO in England, Germer, in the early 1950s, summoned
Gardner back to America to interview him as a candidate for leading
the British OTO. Gardner, it is confirmed, came to America, but by
then Wicca, and Dr. Gardner had begun to take their own, watered-down
course.

Let me close this section by quoting two interesting tidbits for
your consideration.

First consider Doreen Valiente's observation to me concerning "the
Parsons connection". I quote from her letter above mentioned, one of
several she was kind enough to send me in 1986 in connection with my
research into this matter.

...I did know about the existence of the O.T.O. Chapter in
California at the time of Crowley's death, because I believe his ashes
were sent over to them. He was cremated here in Brighton, you know,
much to the scandal of the local authorities, who objected to the
'pagan funeral service.' If you are referring to the group of which
Jack Parsons was a member (along with the egregious Mr. L. Ron
Hubbard), then there is another curious little point to which I must
draw your attention. I have a remarkable little book by Jack Parsons
called Magick, Gnosticism And The Witchcraft. It is
unfortunately undated, but Parsons died in 1952. The section on
witchcraft is particularly interesting because it looks forward to a
revival of witchcraft as the Old Religion....

I find this very thought provoking. Did Parsons write this around
the time that Crowley was getting together with Gardner and perhaps
communicated with the California group to tell them about it? Parsons
began forecasting the "revival of Witchcraft" in the notorious "Liber
49 - The Book of Babalon" written in 1946. The timing of the genesis
of "The Book of Babalon"—which forecast a 'revival' of
witchcraft in covens based on the number eleven (the Thelemic number
of magick) rather than the traditional thirteen, seems to coincide
with Crowley's OTO Charter to Gardner, Gardner's U.S. visit, and also
coincides rather closely with the writing of High Magic's Aid
by Gardner.

We must remember that Ms. Valiente was a close associate of Gardner
and a dedicated and active Wiccan. She, of course, had her own
interpretation of these matters.

The other matter of note is the question of the length of Gardner's
association with the OTO and with Crowley personally. My informant
Col. Lawrence, tells me that he has in his possession a cigarette case
which once belonged to Aleister Crowley. Inside "is a note in
Crowley's hand that says simply: 'gift of GBG, 1936, A. Crowley'."
(Personal letter, 6 December, 1986)

The inscription could be a mistake, it could mean 1946, the period of
the Charter. It could be a gift to Crowley from the Order GBG ("Great
Brotherhood of God") of Crowley's alienated student C.F. Russell, but
the GBG closed its doors in 1938, and well before this Crowley and
Russell had gone their separate ways. It seems odd, as well, that
Crowley would attribute the gift to "GBG" rather than "CFR" if it was
from Russell rather than Gardner. But, as Ms. Valiente put it in a
letter to me of 8th December, 1986:

If your friend is right, then it would mean that old Gerald
actually went through a charade of pretending to Arnold Crowther that
Arnold was introducing him to Crowley for the first time - a charade
which Crowley for some reason was willing to go along with. Why? I
can't see the point of such a pretense; but then occultists sometimes
do devious things...

Gnosticism and Wicca, the subjects of Jack Parsons' essays,
republished by the OTO and Falcon Press in 1990, are the two most
successful expressions to date of Crowley's dream of a popular
solar-phallic religion. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think Aleister and
Gerald may have cooked Wicca up. The issues for Thelemites AND Wiccans
here are, as I see it, two - fold:

If Wicca is the OTO's prodigal daughter in fact, authorized
directly by Crowley, how should they now relate to this?

Then too, what are we to make of and infer about all this business
of a popular Thelemic-Gnostic religion? Were Crowley, Parsons, Gardner
and others trying to do something of note with regard to actualizing a
New Aeon here which bears scrutiny? Or is this mere speculation, and
of little significance for the Great Work today?

If the Charter Crowley issued Gardner is, indeed, the authority
upon which Wicca has been built for more than half a century, then it
is perhaps no coincidence that I acquired that Charter in the same
year I was consecrated a Bishop of the Gnostic Catholic
Church. Further, it was literally only days after my long search for
the original of Gardner's Book of Shadows ended in success that
the Holy Synod of T Michael Bertiaux's branch of the Gnostic Church
unanimously elected me a Missionary Bishop, on August 29, 1986.

Sometimes, I muse, the Inner Order revoked Wicca's charter in 1986,
placing it, so to speak, in my hands. Since I hold it in Trust for the
OTO, perhaps Wicca has, in symbolic form, in its "declaration of
independence" returned home at last. It remains for the Wiccans,
literally (since the charter hangs in my temple space), to read the
handwriting on the wall.

I am indebted to Frater Y.V. for a rare, autographed copy of the
1949 Michael Houghton Edition of High Magic's Aid by "Scire"
(that is, Gardner) identified as "O.T.O. 4 = 7" on the title
page. This is likely a confusion of A.'. A .'. and OTO titles; it is
doubtful that Gardner was a VII° in the OTO. He was, however, at
least a P.I. in OTO, and may have been a VII° as Crowley may have
implied in a late letter that he anticipated the "Gardner Lodge" of
OTO in London could be expected to initiate as high as the
P.I. Degree. This would require the presence of an S.G.I.G., or
VII° member.